Republicans Lost On Both The Culture War And On Reagonomics

November 14, 2012 — Ron Chusid

If the Romney/Ryan Team to Repeal The 20th Century had won last week, there is no doubt they would have continued to call this an election over ideas, with their ideas winning. After losing they have other excuses. Romney blames the loss on “big policy ‘gifts’ that the president had bestowed on loyal Democratic constituencies, including young voters, African-Americans and Hispanics.” He doesn’t understand the concept of government taking legitimate action for the good of the country, accepting the Republican philosophy of denying legitimacy to government. Romney is wrong if he thinks Democratic constituencies receive more than their fair share of government money. It is actually the red states which voted against Obama and for Romney that receives a greater share.

Paul Ryan blamed the loss on the urban vote, ignoring the questions of why Republicans cannot win in the cities and why they are now also losing in the suburbs.

There is a wide range of opinion as to why they lost among conservatives. Conservative culture warrior Bill Bennett is wrong in his ideas, but he gets it right when admitting that Republicans lost the culture war.

I doubt many conservatives will agree with Michael Tomasky that Mitt Romney killed Reagonomics, but he gets it right:

Here’s something that happened in this election that has been largely overlooked but I think is a very big deal indeed. Trickle-down economics died last Tuesday. The post-election chatter has been dominated by demographics, Latinos, women, and the culture war. But economics played a strong and even pivotal role in this election too, and Reaganomics came out a huge loser, while the Democrats have started to wrap their arms around a simple, winning alternative: the idea that government must invest in the middle class and not the rich. It’s middle-out economics instead of trickle-down, and it won last week and will keep on winning…

Supply side was rejected. And in its place, voters went for an economic vision that says: don’t invest in the wealthy in the hope that they’ll decide to spread the wealth around; invest in the middle class, because it’s demand from a prosperous middle class that ultimately creates more jobs, and because doing that makes for a healthier society all the way around. Obama embraced this message late last year in his speech in Kansas, and even though I wouldn’t say he pressed it consistently for a whole year, he certainly emphasized it in the second debate and spoke regularly about it toward the end. “I believe you grow the economy from the middle out,” he said in a key October ad.

Your claim is every bit as irrational as the attacks from the teabaggers, other than lacking the misspelled words. Obama has never advocated privatization of Social Security as Bush did, and has specifically come out against this.